New York Times
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said Sunday that he was not worried that increasing and significant numbers of Americans believed he was Muslim.
"I can't spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead," Obama said in an interview with Brian Williams on "NBC Nightly News." "The facts are the facts. And so it's not something that I spend all my time worrying about. And I don't think the American people want me to spend all my time worrying about it."
Obama, who is Christian, said that as a candidate, and now as president, he has repeatedly dealt with persistent rumors about his religion and with doubts about whether he was born in the United States. A recent poll showed that nearly a fifth of the respondents believed he was Muslim.
The poll, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and its affiliated Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that 18 percent of the people surveyed thought Obama was Muslim, according to a report by The Associated Press.
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A similar poll in March 2009 found that 11 percent of those surveyed thought the president was Muslim.
The portion of the 3,003 people surveyed in the most recent poll who correctly said Obama was Christian was 34 percent, down from 48 percent last March, The AP reported.
Obama attributed the spread of the rumors about his religion and birthplace to "a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly."
"We dealt with it when we were first running for the presidency," he said.
"There were those who said I couldn't win as U.S. senator because I had a funny name and people would be too unfamiliar with it.
"And yet we ended up winning that Senate seat in Illinois because I trusted the American people's capacity to get beyond all this nonsense and focus on, 'Is this somebody who cares about me and cares about my family and has a vision for the future?'" Obama said.
"And so, I will always put my money on the American people. And I'm not going to be worrying too much about whatever rumors are floating on out there."